A topic that gardeners often wonder about is whether or not you can transplant carrots. Usually once carrots begin to grow, depending on if you were a bit heavy handed in sowing the carrot seed, you will probably have to thin the carrot seedings out. This makes room for the adjacent carrots to grow to full size unhindered by their neighbouring carrot.

What do do with the carrot thinnings?

Well, most folks just throw them away, some if they're lucky enough to have them, feed them to pigs, goats, chickens etc. Well this year I did a little experiment on this and saved my thinnings. I transplanted them pretty much immediately once I had them out of the ground. I was as careful as possible when thinning them to minimise damage.

I sowed them in a couple of places afterwards. I sowed the thinned carrots in;

• Another bed I had prepared
• A container (this post primarliy deals with the sucess of this)

If you are growing carrots in containers, whether from seed or from thinnings, you must ensure that the container is deep enough. I managed to get my hand on a 10" deep tray from the restaurant in my local golf club for this purpose. You could of course use a tray or container that was more shallow and build up the sides using something like old tiles or slates or if worse comes to worse, you could just go as you are but the lack of depth will become a problem for the growing carrot as it matures. It should not affect the taste though, you'll just end up with 'butty' and malformed carrots but perfectly edible.

Anyway back to the experiment. I filled my 10" tray with fine compost (important), as stoney/lumpy soil or compost will hinder the growth of carrots leading again to malformed shapes.

I made individual holes for sowing each individual carrot thinning using a small bamboo stick and first filled each hole with rain water I had collected from my water butt. I went down a good distance with the bamboo stick a 'wiggled it around' a bit to widen the hole for transplantation.

I put the carrot thinnings in each hole and filled in and secured. I made 6 rows by 4, so for those of you good at maths, 24 in all. It wasn't too much of a problem keeping them watered this summer as the weather was terrible but every now and again they would require a drop. I didn't give them any plant food either, just to see how well they would grow.

I expected that the thinnings would be somewhat stunted by their uprooting and transplanting and I have to say that they looked fairly sorry for themselves for about a week, maybe a little longer. But lo and behold, nature being nature, they began to pick up and soon began to thrive.

I started picking my non transplanted carrots a few weeks ago and yummy is an understatement. None of that store bought bland rubbish. I actually had a friend down from Dublin the weekend I was pulling them and she had never had a fresh carrot before and couldn't understand what the taste was. IT WAS CARROT!!!

Anyway, after pulling up the transplanted carrots today, these are my findings.....

• Taste: 100% yum
• Size: 60% of non transplanted ones (grown over same period)

While the size of the carrots in gerneral was smaller than the non transplanted ones, it didn't affect the taste and tenderness what so ever. I know they were smaller but at the end of the day, I ended up with 24 more carrots than I would have had originally.

Conclusion

I don't see why you shouldn't transplant them. Waste not, want not and all that and as long as the tray or container was deep enough, sowing them from seed shouldn't be an issue either and will more than likely work better than re-sowing the carrot thinnings. And hey, if it all goes to pot and you end up with wonkey carrots, you can always give them to your dog!!!